Arizona lawmaker lashes out at Cardinal Mahony over comments on illegal immigration bill [Updated]

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican whose bill would require immigrants to carry proof of legal status, lashed out at Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony on Wednesday for his criticism of the proposed legislation, calling the Roman Catholic leader a "guy who’s been protecting child molesters and predators all of his life."

[For the record,  4:24 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Pearce and Mahony himself had exchanged charges  about who carried greater moral authority to speak out on the immigration issue. The cardinal's spokesman, Tod M. Tamberg, said he was speaking for himself, not on behalf of the cardinal.] 

"He's the last guy that ought to be speaking out," Pearce said on the Michael Smerconish radio talk program, a nationally syndicated talk show which airs locally on KFWB-AM (980). "This guy has a history of protecting and moving predators around in order to avoid detection by the law. He has no room to talk."

Pearce's legislation, which has yet to be signed by Gov. Jan Brewer, has created a national firestorm as opponents and supporters call it the nation's toughest law against illegal immigrants.  The bill would make it a crime to be in the state illegally and require law enforcement officers to check the legal status of those whom they suspect are undocumented. The legislation would also bar people from soliciting work or hiring workers under certain circumstances, a provision aimed at the day-labor trade.

But Pearce's remarks about Mahony, which aired live this afternoon and can be heard on tape delay at 7-10 p.m., drew an equally feisty retort from the cardinal's spokesman, Tod M. Tamberg.

"Mudslinging and fear mongering are the essence of Sen. Pearce's remarks," Tamberg wrote in an e-mail. "He desperately wants to change the subject, throwing up a wall of inaccurate statements about Cardinal Mahony because he has no good answer to the cardinal's challenge that this is a draconian and unjust law."

Mahony, a nationally influential figure who heads the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese with 4.3 million members, lambasted Pearce's bill on his blog this week, likening it to “German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques” that compelled people to turn each other in.

“The Arizona Legislature just passed the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law,” the cardinal wrote on his blog. “The tragedy of the law is its totally false reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense.”
 
But Pearce said his legislation was not aimed at immigrants who comply with U.S. laws and enter legally.
 
"We love and admire immigrants who come here to assimilate to be Americans," Pearce said. "This has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with those who enter our country illegally."
 
The senator said the cardinal was ignoring the plight of countless crime victims of illegal immigrants, including police officers who have been killed and teenage girls who have been kidnapped and raped. In a recent high-profile case, authorities suspect an illegal immigrant shot and killed Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, who was found dead on his own property.
 
"Where does he stand up for America and the rule of law?" Pearce said of Mahony. "He ought to be embarrassed and he ought to be drummed out as far as I'm concerned."

Pearce said that Mahony's defense of illegal immigrants might have to do with "tithes and offerings and how he fills the pews in his churches that has had a declining enrollment." 
 
Meanwhile, several police chiefs spoke out Wednesday against the bill, saying provisions requiring officers to check for illegal status would drain resources away from fighting more serious crime, dissuade immigrants from cooperating with police and subject officers to charges of racial profiling. The Arizona Assn. of Chiefs of Police cited similar concerns in opposing the Pearce legislation.
 
“This unfunded mandate will strain underfunded police departments and increase their liability,"  George Gascon, San Francisco police chief, said in a statement. "It will have a catastrophic effect on policing and set back community policing efforts for decades."
 
Arturo Venegas, former Sacramento police chief, said the bill "essentially legislates racial profiling, putting police in the middle of the train tracks to face an onslaught of civil rights violations lawsuits."
 
The police chiefs said the federal government needed to step up to control illegal immigration, rather than shift the burden to local law enforcement.

-- Teresa Watanabe

Photo: Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Leon]

I support the AZ law. I don't support Mahony because he has protected child molesters and predators.

[Judy]

Mahoney is leaving. The pedophile protector and supporter of illegals will finally be gone. Only to be replaced by the same ilk. No wonder I'm a lapsed Catholic.

[youareuniquelikeeveryoneelse]

Pearce is my new hero, and I am very legal Hispanic-American by the way. This political meddling on Cardinal Baloney's behalf should be grounds to strip the Catholic Church of its tax-free status

[Duped Tax Payer]

Mahoney is protect Latino illegals in general. He is lumping in with legal, citizen and illegal. An illegal is an illegal regardless of which country you come from. We just want everybody to play by the book and obey the laws of the land.

[Brett]

Mahony's very real culpability in the protection of serial child abusers and molesters, which included compliance in the transfers of perpetrators and stonewalling investigations by refusing to disclose documents under the false and improper pretext of 'privilege,' is beside the point. Arizona lawmaker Pearce should instead focus on the fact that Mahony is advocating defiance of, and noncompliance with, existing United States immigration laws. If, in fact, Mahony has been interviewing undocumented illegal immigrants, he may have, in fact, been harboring such immigrants and could potentially be guilty of federal crimes, as well. Mahony has a self-serving reason for taking the side of the illegal immigrant, since many of the illegal immigrants in the American Southwest, including here in Los Angeles, are Catholic, and Mahony seeks to increase his flock and therefore his influence. While Mahony never rose higher than his position of Cardinal (I'm sure he aspired to, but never had a hope of achieving, higher office within the Roman Catholic Church), he has always sought to enlarge the scope of his power.

Mahony treats the immigration law as if it's a law that should simply be ignored. He views it as an annoyance, a hindrance, as if there's no reason why our borders should simply be thrown open to anyone and everyone who wants to cross them. He decries that there are "mixed" or "blended" families where some members are legal, and some are not, and talks of undocumented workers who cannot find work now because they lack documentation.

Had these people entered the country legally and availed themselves of the immigration process, they would not be in these situations. As for "blended" families, they are comprmised either of a mix of people who legally entered the country with family members who did not, or people who illegally entered the country and subsequently bore children in the United States, a loophole in our Constitution and citizenship laws which must be seriously examined.

[Jim]

Russell Pearce is correct. Cardinal Mahoney doesn't have any authority in this area. He has no moral authority that anyone with any intelligence should follow. He protects 2 types of criminals; child molesters and illegal aliens, all to help buck up his corrupt and declining church. All he cares about is money$$$$.

[gerrrg]

Dear Arizonans, feel free to spend your own tax dollars to erect a solid border fence around your entire state's perimeter to keep yourselves in, and the rest of us out.

[Marlena]

You Amnesty fools have tried for so long to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration - trying to lump it into one process but we educated American citizens are fully aware of the differences. You Amnesty fools are not doing your ignorant illegal aliens any good trying to brainwash them into believing that there is no difference.

We citizens of the United States will not accept amnesty this time - only full deporation will satisfy us - we are sick of your stupid lack of logic and the audicity and arrogance shown by illegal aliens.

[Alex Nunez]

Ummmm... has anyone ever heard of something called a ad hominem fallacy? Pearce is full of it and so is anyone who thinks its ok to infringe any persons rights.

[WillIam]

Not only is he going to lose the campaign funding of valuable police endorsements, now he wants to burn the Catholic vote too. Bold move. At least he'll make a name for himself.

[Gonz]

Cardinal Mahony is a Left-wing, pro-homosexual, and more than likely a member of AM Church.He has no business lecturing Arizona and he should have preached against the evils of homosexual/pedophile sins.

[Good1]

"Pearce said that Mahony's defense of illegal immigrants might have to do with... how he fills the pews in his churches"

Is he suggesting the Catholic church is now filled with illegal immigrants? Or is he saying his church would not seek to enroll illegal immigrants?

Do non-extremist Christian churches really discriminate like this?

[Momo]

All these comments about illegal immigrants are wrong and out of line. Everybody in this country is an immigrant. Immigrants from England took the Native American's lands. It doesn't matter if you are white. Your ancestor where immigrants, so lets learn about the United States History before we start talking as if this was our own country. We invaded this land.

[Ryan Mims]

I do not support the bill I think it needs more work. As far as the Catholic Church goes I think they need to fix whats going on in there house before they talk about our law system. Clear the Catholic Church has it own problems
to fix.